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Tuesday, June 6, 2017

obama: ahollow man with ruling class ideas

June 2, 2017- counterpunch.orgA “Hollow” Man Who Was “Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight”

What
on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law
professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page
(1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama
from conception through election to the White House? Not any great
personal affinity for Obama on Garrow’s part, that’s for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama
is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow
describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and
“failed presidency” as a man who had long ago had become a “vessel
[that] was hollow at its core.”Near
the conclusion, Garrow notes how disappointed and betrayed many of
Obama’s former friends felt by a president who “doesn’t feel indebted to
people” (in the words of a former close assistant) and who spent
inordinate time on the golf course and “celebrity hobnobbing” (1067).
Garrow quotes one of Obama’s “long-time Hyde Park [Chicago] friend[s],”
who offered a stark judgement: “Barack is a tragic figure: so much
potential, such critical times, but such a failure to perform…like he is
an empty shell…Maybe the flaw is hubris, deep and abiding hubris….”
(1065). Garrow quotes the onetime and short-lived Obama backer Dr.
Cornel West on how Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be a
counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a national
security presidency…a brown-faced Clinton: another opportunist.”The
subject of Garrow’s meticulous history is a single-minded climber ready
to toss others (including family members, lovers, and close friends)
aside in service to an all-consuming quest for political power fueled by
a belief in his own special “destiny.” (It is clear from Rising Star
that Obama was set on a run for the presidency by age twenty-five.)
Dozens of former Obama associates interviewed by Garrow report having
been impressed, even blown away by the future president as a young man.
But many others were put off by Obama’s sense of superiority and
arrogance (“full of himself” by the recollection of one Harvard Law
classmate [p. 337]) and by his often lecturing, professorial “know it
all” presentation – and by his transparent hyper-ambition.During
his time at Harvard Law, fellow students invented “the Obamanometer” – a
numerical measure of how long Obama would spend taking up class time
with long-winded dialogue with the professor, often while claiming to
speak on behalf of his fellow students.Obama
struck many on his way up as far too impressed with his own
awesomeness. As one of his fellow black Illinois state senators
commented to another veteran legislator as Obama began his eight-year
career in the Illinois Senate in 1996, “Can you believe this guy’s some
thirty years old [and] he’s already written a book about himself?”
(p.600)Progressives
lobbyists found Obama “a disappointing legislator” during his time in
the Illinois Senate. According to Al Sharp, executive director of
Protestants for the Common Good, state senator Obama was “so very
pragmatic” that “he,” in Garrow’s words, “was unwilling to fight to the good fight.”
By Garrow’s account. “Legal aid veteran Linda Mills recalled that
[state senator] Barack ‘sponsored a number of bills I wrote,’ but ‘I
stopped seeking him out as a chief sponsor early on’ because Barack was
‘disengaged’ rather than actively pushing the bills. ‘He was never
involved in the legislation,’ and on many days Barack was simply
‘unavailable. Golfing, playing basketball. He was just out to lunch so
often’” (p.731)An Ugly Offer: Money for SilenceI find a different story related in Rising Star
just as disturbing. It comes from April of 2008, when then presidential
candidate Obama was being compelled by the Hillary Clinton campaign to
throw his onetime South Side Chicago “spiritual mentor” Reverend Jeremiah Wright under
the bus because Obama’s association with the fiery Black and
left-leaning pulpit master was costing him too many white votes. On
April 12, 2008, Obama visited Wright, asking him not to do “any more
public speaking until after the November election.” Wright refused.
“Barack left empty-handed but before long Wright received an e-mail from
Barack’s close friend Eric Whitaker, also a Trinity [church] member,
offering Wright $150,000 ‘not to preach at all’ in the months ahead.”
(p.1044). Wright refused.How was that for progressive hope and change?“A Work of Historical Fiction”Young
Obama tried to beat historians to the punch by writing a deceptive,
self-serving account of his own first three and half decades gracing the
planet with his “special qualities.” Garrow, to his credit, doesn’t
fall for it. Rising Star takes the future president’s 1995 book Dreams From My FatherDreams
and some of Obama’s later autobiographical reflections to task for:
inventing a deep racial identity drama that never occurred during
Obama’s early years in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Occidental College;
incorrectly portraying Obama as a “difference-maker” on his high school
basketball team; deceptively claiming that Obama had been an angry
“thug” during high school; deleting the Community Party background of
the Black “old poet” (“Frank,” as in longtime Communist Party activist
Frank Davis) who gave Obama advice as a teenager in Honolulu;
inaccurately claiming that Obama have received a “full scholarship” to
Occidental; misrepresenting himself as a leader in the movement against
South African apartheid at Occidental; exaggerating Obama’s involvement
in anti-apartheid activism at Columbia University; covering up evidence
of Obama’s enrollment in a Columbia course taught by a Marxist
academic; absurdly mispresenting the nature of Obama’s work for the New
York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) at the City University of
New York; concocting a mythical and supposedly life-changing dialogue
with a “black security guard” on Obama’s first trip from New York City
to begin community organizing work on the far South Side of Chicago;
falsely claiming that Obama converted to Christianity during his early
years in Chicago; largely writing Obama’s white mother out of his
autobiography, which spilled far more ink on a father (Barack Obama.
Sr.) who played little role in his life; painting a “decidedly
uncharitable portrait” of Obama’s loving white maternal grandfather
(Stanley Dunham) who did so much to raise him; suggesting that Obama’s
maternal white grandmother was a racist; unduly downplaying Obama’s
supreme enjoyment of his years at Harvard Law School; and coldly
condensing his three top pre-marital girlfriends (more on them below)
“into a single woman whose appearance in the book was fleeting indeed.”
Garrow judges Dreams “a work of historical fiction,” not a serious autobiography or memoir.The Revenge of Sheila Jager: “His Deep-Seated Need to be Loved and Admired”Rising Star
might almost deserve the sub-title “The Revenge of Sheila Jager.” Like
Garrow’s giant and classic 1986 biography of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., Rising Star gets very, very personal. Garrow reports the
complaints of Obama’s three former girlfriends – Alex McNair, Genevieve
Cook, and Sheila Jager. Each one recalls an Obama that was ultimately
inaccessible and hopelessly self-involved. Ms. Jager, a partly white
Asian-American University of Chicago anthropology graduate student when
she met Obama, garners singular attention. She fell into a prolonged and
ardent affair with then community organizer Obama during the late
1980s. But her long and tumultuous relationship with him was doomed by
the color of her skin. Obama shared the passion but decided he could not
marry her because his political ambitions in Chicago required a Black
spouse.Garrow
recounts an ugly scene in the summer of 1987. A loud and long dispute
developed one day at the Wisconsin summer home of a friend. From the
morning onwards, a witness recalled, “they were back and forth, having
sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling.… That whole
afternoon, they went back and forth between having sex and fighting,”
with Jager yelling: “That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason.”Near
the end of his colossal volume, Garrow says that “no one alive brought
deeper insight into the tragedy of Barack Obama than Sheila Jager.” He
reproduces numerous quotations from Jager, now an Oberlin College
anthropology professor. As a young woman, she was frustrated by young
Obama’s lack of “courage.” Writing to Garrow in August of 2013, Jager
saw that cowardice in his excessively “pragmatic,” disengaged, and
“compromising” presidency:

“the
seeds of his future failings were always present in Chicago. He made a
series of calculated decisions when he began to map out his political
life at the time and they involved some deep compromises. There is a
familiar echo in the language he uses now to talk about the compromises
he’s always forced to make and the way he explained his future to me
back then, saying in effect I ‘wish’ I could do this, but ‘pragmatism
and the reality of the world has forced me to do that.’ From the
bailout out to NSA to Egypt, it is always the same. The problem is that
‘pragmatism’ can very much look like what works best for the moment.
Hence, the constant criticism that there is no strategic vision behind
his decisions. Perhaps this pragmatism and need to just ‘get along in
the world’ (by accepting the world as it is instead of trying to change
it) stems from his deep-seated need to be loved and admired which has
ultimately led him on the path to conformism and not down the path of
greatness which I had hoped for him.” (1065)

The italics are Garrow’s. He added emphasis to the entire passage.Or Maybe He Really Believed All that “Vacuous to Repressive Neoliberal” and “Pragmatism” StuffGarrow’s mammoth biography is a tour de force
when it comes to personal critique, professional appraisal, and epic
research and documentation. His mastery of the smallest details in
Obama’s life and career and his ability to place those facts within a
narrative that keeps the reader’s attention (no small feat at 1078
pages!) is remarkable. Rising Star falls short, however, on
ideological appraisal. In early 1996, the brilliant left Black political
scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. captured the stark moral and political
limits of what would become the state and then national Obama phenomenon
and indeed the Obama presidency. Writing of an unnamed Obama, Reed observed that:

“In
Chicago…we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched
black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with
impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal
politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal
foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was
softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about
meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the
predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity
politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring
form over substance.”

Garrow
very incompletely quotes Reed’s reflection only to dismiss it as “an
academic’s way of calling Barack an Uncle Tom.” That is an unfortunate
judgement. Reed’s assessment was richly born-out by Obama’s subsequent
political career. Like his politcio-ideological soul-brothers Bill
Clinton and Tony Blair (and perhaps now Emmanuel Macron), Obama’s public
life has been a wretched monument to the dark power of the neoliberal
corporate-financial and imperial agendas behind the progressive pretense
of façade of telegenic and silver-tongued professional class politicos.Reed’s
prescient verdict more than 12 years before Obama became president
brings more insight to the Obama tragedy than Jager’s reflection five
years into Obama’s presidency. Obama’s nauseating taste for supposedly
(and deceptively) non-ideological “get things done” “pragmatism,”
“compromise,” and “playing it safe” – for “accepting the world as it is
instead of trying to change it” (Jager) – was not simply or merely a
personality quirk or psychological flaw. It was also and far more
significantly a longstanding way for “liberal” Democratic presidents and
other politicos to appear “tough-minded” and stoutly determined to
“getting things done” while they subordinate the fake-populist and
progressive-sounding values they mouth to get elected to the harsh “deep
state” facts of U.S. ruling class, imperial, and “national security”
power. A “pragmatic,” supposedly non-ideological concern for policy
effectiveness – “what can be accomplished in the real world” – has long
given “liberal” presidents a manly way to justify governing in accord
with the wishes of the nation’s ruling class and power elite.Garrow and Jager might want to look at a forgotten political science classic, Bruce Miroff’s Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy
[1976].) After detailing the supposedly progressive Kennedy’s
cool-headed, Harvard-minted, and “best and brightest” service to the
nation’s reigning corporate, imperial, and racial hierarchies, Miroff
explained that:

“Most
modern presidents have claimed the title of ‘pragmatist’ for
themselves. Richard Nixon was just as concerned as John Kennedy and
Lyndon Johnson to announce that he was not wedded to dogma, and that his
administration would follow a realistic and flexible course. It has
chiefly been the liberal presidents, however, who have captured the
pragmatic label…For liberal presidents – and for those who have advised
them – the essential mark of pragmatism is its ‘tough-mindedness.’
Pragmatism is equated with strength and intellectual and moral
strength that can accept a world stripped of illusions and can take the
facts unadorned. Committed to liberal objectives, yet free from
liberal sentimentality, the pragmatic liberal sees himself as grappling
with brute and unpleasant facts of political reality in order to
humanize and soften those facts…The great enemy for pragmatic liberals
is ideology…An illusory objectivity is one of the pillars of pragmatic
‘tough-mindedness.’ The second pillar is readiness for power.
Pragmatists are interested in what works; their prime criterion of value
is success…[and] as a believer in concrete results, the pragmatist is
ineluctably drawn to power. For it is power that gets things done most
easily, that makes things work most successfully.” (Pragmatic Illusions, 283-84, emphasis added).

The
classic neoliberal Bill Clinton embraced the pragmatic and
non-ideological “get things done” façade for state capitalist and
imperialist policy. So did the pioneering neoliberal Jimmy Carter and
the great corporate liberals Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kenney and Franklin
Roosevelt. Was this really or mainly because they were psychologically
wounded? The deeper and more relevant reality is that they functioned
atop a Superpower nation-state rule by unelected and interrelated
dictatorships of money, empire, and white supremacism. They were
educated, socialized, seduced and indoctrinated – to understand in their
bones that those de facto dictatorships must remain intact
(Roosevelt boasted of having saved the profits system) and that liberal
“reform” must always bend to the will of reigning institutions and
doctrines of concentrated wealth, class, race, and power. Some or all of
them may well have to believe and internalize the purportedly
non-ideological ideology of wealth- and power-serving pragmatism. And
Obama was either a true believer or one who cynically chose to
impersonate one as the ticket to power quite early on.A Fully Minted Neoliberal Early OnThe irony here is that one can consult Rising Star to determine the basic underlying accuracy of Reed’s acerbic description. My foremost revelation from Rising Star is
that Obama was fully formed as a fake-progressive neoliberal-capitalist
actor well before he ever received his first big money campaign
contribution. He’s headed down the same ideological path as the
Clintons even before Bill Clinton walks into the Oval Office. Obama’s
years in the corporate-funded foundation world, the great ruling and
professional class finishing schools Columbia University Harvard Law,
and the great neoliberal University of Chicago’s elite Law School were
more than sufficient to mint him as a brilliant if “vacuous to
repressive neoliberal.”During his years at Harvard Law, Garrow notes, Obama took said the following at a Turner Broadcasting African American Summit for the 1990s:

“Whenever
we blame society for everything, or blame white racism for everything,
then inevitably we’re giving away our own power…if we can get start
getting beyond some of these old divisions [of race, place, and class]
and look at the possibilities of crafting pragmatic, practical
strategies that are going to focus on what’s going to make it work and
less about whether it fits into one ideological mold or another.”

These were classic neoliberal and ruling class themes.Along
with a healthy dose of market economics, this was the heavily
ideological if nominally anti-ideological essence of much of Obama’s
intellectual work at Harvard Law, where he and his good friend the
former economist Rob Fisher were drawn to the courses of a libertarian
professor and wrote oxymoronically about the progressive and democratic
potential of “market forces.” Like other ruling class and professional
class educational and ideological institutions of “higher education,”
Harvard Law was and remains a great schoolhouse of precisely the kind of
“pragmatism” which knows that no policies and visions can work that
don’t bow to the holy power of the finance-led corporate and imperial
state, ruling in the name of the market among other things.Again,
and again across Garrow’s many hundreds of pages on Obama’s community
organizing and legislative career one hears about the future president’s
classically neoliberal efforts to address poverty and joblessness by
increasing the market value of poor and jobless folks’ “human capital”
and “skill sets.” Never does one learn of any serious call on his part
for the radical and democratic redistribution of wealth and power and
the advance of a people’s political economy based on solidarity and the
common good, not the profits of the investor class.The
main things Obama needed to add on to fulfill his “destiny” after
Harvard Law were a political career in elected office, a great moment of
national celebrity (his spectacular Keynote Address to the Democratic
National Convention in August of 2004), elite financial sponsorship
(including record-setting Wall Street backing in 2007 and 2008), and
proper appreciation and articulation of U.S.-imperial Council on Foreign
Relations ideology. All of this and more, including no small good
fortune (including the awfulness of the George W. Bush administration
and the 2007-08 Hillary Clinton campaign), followed and brought us to
the great neoliberal “disappointment” that was the Obama presidency.Curious Deletions: MacFaquhar, Marxists, and the Ruling Class SponsorsThere are some interesting deletions in Rising Star. It is odd that the meticulous Garrow never quotes a remarkable essay published by The New Yorker in the spring of 2007. In early May of that year, six months after Obama had declared his candidacy for the White House, the New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar
penned a memorable portrait of Obama titled “The Conciliator: Where is
Barack Obama Coming From?” “In his view of history, in his respect for
tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but
very, very slowly,” MacFarquhar wrote after extensive interviews with
the candidate, “Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean…It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good” (emphasis added).MacFarquhar
cited as an example of this reactionary sentiment Obama’s reluctance to
embrace single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model, which he
told her would “so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what
they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.” Obama
told MacFarquhar that “we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and
managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different
system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s
not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for
most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”So
what if large popular majorities in the U.S. had long favored the
single-payer model? So what if single payer would let people keep the
doctors of their choice, only throwing away the protection pay off to
the private insurance mafia? So what if “the legacy systems” Obama
defended included corporate insurance and pharmaceutical oligopolies
that regularly threw millions of American lives by the wayside of market
calculation, causing enormous disruptive harm and death for the
populace?Was
this personal weakness and cowardice? The deeper reality is that
Obama’s “deeply conservative” beliefs reflected an either calculated or
heartfelt allegiance to neoliberal “free market” ideals and related
pragmatic and “realistic” ruling- and elite professional-class values
inculcated and absorbed at Harvard Law, in the corporate-captive
foundation world, and through his many contacts in the elite business
sector and the foreign policy establishment as he rose in the American
System. Along with a bottomless commitment to the long American imperial
project, those power-serving beliefs were written all over Obama’s
conservative late 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (Obama’s second book and his second book mainly about himself – see my critical review of it on Black Agenda Report in early 2007 here),
whose right-wing and imperial content Garrow ignores. They also raised
their head in the famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address
(see my critical reflection on that oration at the time here)
that did so much to make Obama an overnight national and even global
celebrity – another document whose right-leaning ideological nature
escapes Garrow’s attention.Like
Obama’s neoliberal and imperial ideology, the many left activists and
writers (this reviewer included) who saw through Obama’s progressive
pretense and warned others about it early on are basically missing in Rising Star.
The list of Left commentators left out is long. It includes Bruce
Dixon, Glen Ford, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky. Alexander Cockburn,
Margaret Kimberly, Jeffrey St. Clair, Roger Hodge, Pam Martens, Ajamu
Baraka, Doug Henwood, Juan Santos, Marc Lamont Hill, John R. MacArthur,
and a host of others (Please see the sub-section titled “Insistent Left
Warnings” on pages 176-177 in the sixth chapter, titled “We Were
Warned,” of my 2010 book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power[Paradigm, 2014], my second carefully researched Obama book not to make it into Garrow’s endnotes or bibliography).Also
largely missing – the other side of the coin of omission, so to speak –
in Garrow’s sprawling acount is the elite corporate and financial class
that made record-setting contributions to Obama’s rise with an
understanding that Obama was very much on their side. How write a
1000-page plus account of Obama’s rise to power without at least once
mentioning that august and unparalleled ruling class figure Robert
Rubin, whose nod of approval was critical to Obama’s ascendancy? As Greg Palast
noted, Rubin “opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama.
Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much
from bankers as his Republican opponent.”Rubin
would also serve as a top informal Obama adviser and placed a number of
his protégés in high-ranking positions in the Obama administration.
Rubin’s Obama appointees included Timothy Geithner (Obama’s first
treasury secretary), Peter Orszag (Obama’s first Office of Management
and Budget director), and Larry Summers (first chief economic adviser).Just
as odd as his ignoring of MacFarquhar’s May 2007 essay is Garrow’s
inattention to a remarkable report from Ken Silverstein’s six months
before. “It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want,” the
progressive journalist Ken Silverstein noted in a Harpers’ Magazine report
titled “Obama, Inc.” in November of 2006, “but it seems safe to
conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in
clean government and political reform…On condition of anonymity,”
Silverstein added, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to
point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if
they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the
dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” Obama’s allegiance to the
American business elite was evident from the get go. It was well
understood by the K Street insiders that Silverstein interviewed in the
fall of 2006.His
“dollar value” to Wall Street would become abundantly clear in early
2009, when he told a frightened group of Wall Street executives that
“I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…I’m going to shield
you from congressional and public anger.” For the banking elite, who had
destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Garrow’s fellow
Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Sukind wrote, “Nothing to worry about. Whereas
[President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression]
pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously
said ‘I welcome their hate,’ Obama was saying ‘How can I help?’” As one
leading banker told Suskind, “The sense of everyone after the meeting
was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At
that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we
would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out,
to quell the mob.”On Love and AdmirationAs
noted above, professor Jager told Garrow that the limits of Obama’s
presidency stemmed from his longstanding “need to be loved and admired.”
But surely that need would have been met to no small degree had
Obama (like Roosevelt in 1935 and 1936) governed in at least partial
accord with the progressive-sounding rhetoric he campaigned on in 2007
and 2008. Beyond the social, democratic, security and environmental
benefits that would have been experienced by millions of Americans and
world citizens under an actually progressive Obama presidency, such policy would have been good politics for
both Obama and the Democratic Party. It might well have pre-empted the
Tea Party rebellion and kept the orange-haired beast Donald Trump – a
dodgy neo-fascistic legacy of Obama and the Clintons’ ruling- and
professional-class Ivy League elitism – out of the White House. The
bigger problem here was Obama’s love and admiration for the nation’s
reigning wealth and power elite – or, perhaps, his reasonable
calculation that the powers that be held a monopoly on the means of
bestowing public love and admiration. Non-conformism to the ruling class
carries no small cost in a media and politics culture owned by that
class.The Biggest Omission: EmpireThe most glaring thing missing in Rising Star
is any understanding of U.S, Senator and presidential candidate Obama’s
imperial world view. His brazenly “American exceptionalist” and
imperial mindset, straight out of the Council on Foreign Relations, was
written all over Obama’s foreign policy speeches and writings (including
large sections of The Audacity of Hope) in 2006, 2007, and
2008. I wrote about this at length in the fourth chapter (titled “How
Antiwar? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire”) in my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. This significant omission but it is unsurprising given Garrow’s own apparent enmeshment in the American imperial mindset. Rising Star’s
long epilogue includes John McCain-like criticisms of Obama for failing
to launch military strikes on Syria and for being too allergic to “the
use, or even the threat of force” in global affairs. Garrow even offers a
lengthy critical quote on the need for “the next president” to be more
“resolute” from the former leading imperialist defense secretary Robert
Gates, who Garrow strangely describes as “the weightiest and most widely
respected voice of all.”“Problems Out There with the Situation of African-Americans in Society”Obama first became something of a celebrity when he became the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review
in February of 1990. “I wouldn’t want people to see my election,”
Obama told the Associated Press, “as a symbol that there aren’t problems
out there with the situation of African-Americans in society” (Garrow, Rising Star,
p. 392). Note the carefully calibrated nature of Obama’s public
commentary already at the age of 28: “problems out there with the
situation of African-Americans in society” could just as easily refer to
alleged Black personal and cultural failure (a persistent
white-pleasing theme in the rising star’s political rhetoric) as it
could to cultural and/or institutional and societal racism. Note also
that while Obama’s election and re-election to the U.S. presidency
brought few if any tangible material and policy gains to Black America
(whose already terrible economic situation deteriorated significantly
during his time in office), it functioned as something like the last
nail in the coffin of many whites’ stark reluctance to acknowledge that
the nation’s still deeply embedded racism any longer poses real barriers
to Black advancement and equality in the U.S. “Are you kidding me?”
I’ve heard countless whites say, “we elected a Black president! Stop
talking about racism!” Never mind the persistence of deeply embedded
racial inequality and oppression at the heart of the nation’s labor and
housing markets, credit and investment systems, legal and criminal
justice systems, its military and police state, and its educational and
media systems – and the dogged tenacity of personal and cultural race
prejudice among a considerable part of the white populace. In that and
other ways, the tragedy of the Obama years has been greatest of all for
those at the bottom of the nation’s steep social and economic wells.King v. ObamaIf
I could ask Garrow one question beyond the personal matter of why my
own heavily researched and annotated study of (and Left warning on)
“rising star” Obama (Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics
[Paradigm-Routledge, 2008]) is so egregiously missing in his
bibliography and endnotes, it is this: what does Garrow think his
previous epic biography subject Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. (who
politely refused progressives’ effort to enlist him as a presidential
candidate and whose bust sat behind Obama in the Oval Office), would
have thought of the career of Garrow’s new epic biography subject,
Barack Obama? As
Garrow knows, King in his final years inveighed eloquently against what
he called “the triple evils that are interrelated,” essentially
capitalism, racism, and militarism-imperialism. King came to the end of
his martyred life with the belief that the real faults in American life
lay not so much in “men” as in the oppressive institutions and social
structures that reigned over them. He wrote that
“the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to
be faced” beyond “superficial” matters. He had no interest, of course,
in running for the White House of all things.Obama
took a very different path, one that enlisted him in service both to
narcissistic self and to each of the very triple evils (and other ones
as well) that King dedicated his life to resisting.The Obama-King contrast continues into Obama’s post-presidential years. As Garrow showed in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King. Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(William Morrow, 1986), the great Civil Rights leader and democratic
socialist Dr. King sternly refused to cash in on his fame. Now that he
out of the White House, Obama, by contrast, is cashing in. He’s raking
in millions from the publishing industry and Wall Street and he’s back
to his old “hobnobbing” ways with the rich and famous.The
reverend would be 88 years old if he had been blessed with longevity.
My guess is that he would be less than pleased at the life and career of
the nation’s first technically Black president.

About Me

Truth will not make you rich, but it will make you free.--Francis Bacon

Marvin has been ignored and silenced,like Malcolm would be ignored and silenced if he had lived on into the Now. He's one of the most extraordinary, exciting black intellectuals living today --Rudolph Lewis, Chickenbones.